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So ... Has Anyone Seen the Oil That Spilled into the Gulf?

Arnold

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So ... Has Anyone Seen the Oil That Spilled into the Gulf?
by Juli Weiner

spillfromspace.jpg


Scientists and government officials are currently on the hunt for much of the oil that leaked into the Gulf of Mexico, reports The Washington Post. While experts remain positive that the oil is still in the Gulf??????That stuff's somewhere,??? a researcher hypothesized to the paper???most of it is AWOL. According to the Post, ???p to 4 million barrels (167 million gallons), the vast majority of the spill, remains unaccounted for in government statistics. Some of it has, most likely, been cleaned up by nature. Other amounts may be gone from the water, but they could have taken on a second life as contaminants in the air, or in landfills around the Gulf Coast.???

Some believe that a portion of the oil was consumed by ocean-dwelling microbes. The tiny organisms, like humans, enjoy oil on their seafood. But the microbes can only do so much: scientists are also reporting that masses of oil have migrated miles away from the spill. Other researchers have observed small quantities of oil located within the bodies of the Gulf???s population of crabs. Crabs, unlike microbes, should not ingest oil. Still, of the 5.2 million barrels that likely leaked, we???ve only destroyed 1.2 million barrels worth of the stuff. The country will continue to restlessly search the land and seas for oil, which, really, is exactly what we???ve always done anyway.
 
i'm confused
 
they have estimates of how much oil leaked over the 3 months and they have estimates of how much was burned, skimmed, evaporated, eaten by microbes, etc. and no one knows where the remaining 40% of the oil went, possibly on the seafloor. Either way it's a big concern because the oil can continue to cause environmental issues for years to come.
 
Federal official to outline what lies ahead after oil spill is sealed
By the CNN Wire Staff
July 29, 2010 11:18 a.m. EDT

New Orleans, Louisiana (CNN) -- Two weeks after the ruptured oil well in the Gulf of Mexico was capped and stopped leaking, the man overseeing the federal response to the disaster will meet New Orleans-area parish presidents to outline plans for after the well is permanently sealed.

Retired Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen is optimistic that steps planned for the coming days will finally, permanently seal the well.

"The relief well, while it is deep, is something that has been done before," Allen said. "The technologies involved here are not novel, but obviously, the depth is a challenge here. But we are optimistic we will get this done."

Allen offered that assessment as preparations proceeded for two efforts to kill the well about a mile below the surface -- first, sealing it from above by pouring down mud and cement in an operation known as "static kill," and then closing it off from below by an intersecting relief well.

The static kill could begin Sunday, while the relief well may be ready for the "bottom kill" effort five to seven days afterward.

Allen said no anomalies or breaches have been detected at the well, and pressure is rising slowly -- signs that it is structurally sound. The static kill would not work if there's a leak.

The ship that would pour the mud and cement for the static kill, the Q4000, is on the scene and ready to go.

Workers had been forced to disconnect their equipment and retreat from the well site late last week, when Tropical Storm Bonnie loomed as a potential threat. But when Bonnie lost intensity, workers returned to the site over the weekend.

More than 2,000 miles away, in Boise, Idaho, a panel of federal judges were meeting Thursday to consider arguments on where litigation over the Deepwater Horizon rig explosion and oil gusher should be consolidated. The Deepwater Horizon rig, off the coast of Louisiana, triggered the oil disaster when it exploded April 20, killing 11 people, and sank shortly afterward.

New Orleans and Houston, Texas, appear to be the favorites for the lawsuit sites because of their proximity to oil company offices and litigants surrounding the disaster.

BP estimates that in August, it will pay at least $60 million in advance to Gulf coast claimants who have lost income or net profit because of the oil spill, the company said in a statement Wednesday.

BP's incoming Chief Executive Officer Bob Dudley said Wednesday that the company has written $250 milllion in checks for claims.

Resolving the crisis is "the single highest priority for BP going forward," he told CNN's "American Morning."

"The only way you can build a reputation is not just by words but by action," said Dudley, whom BP named Tuesday to replace CEO Tony Hayward on October 1.

"I picked up that people think that ... once we cap this well, we're somehow going to pack up and disappear," he said. "That is certainly not the case. We've got a lot of clean-up to do. We've got claims facilities. We've got 35 of those around the Gulf coast."

Meanwhile, with no more oil flowing from the well, it's getting harder and harder to find oil on the surface, according to Coast Guard Rear Adm. Paul Zukunft, the federal on-scene coordinator.

He says crews flying over the Gulf have only been finding "light bands of oil," compared with the huge swaths when the well was still spewing.

But Doug Inkley, senior scientist for the National Wildlife Federation, is skeptical that the situation is improving.

"We've swept the oil under the rug, if you will, because we've applied a tremendous amount of dispersants to it. What this means is that most of the oil has been dispersed throughout the entire water column, so that we're not seeing it on the surface. So really, it's been hidden from sight," Inkley told CNN's American Morning on Thursday.

"Humpty Dumpty has already fallen off the wall as soon as you spill it. You're never going to recover more than 5 or 10 percent of it in a deepwater spill like this, and that's an optimistic projection. So we have to recognize that most of it is still out there. And this spill is some 16, 17, 18 times larger than the wreck of the Exxon Valdez in Prince William Sound. So, this is a much larger spill and we've learned from that spill, the previous spill, as well as many other oil spills, that the effects can last for decades," he said.

Inkley also expressed worry about the Gulf's wildlife.

"My biggest concern is the long-term effects on the food chain because the small organisms are eaten by the bigger organisms. It's still underwater and could have an effect for years, if not decades to come," he said.

But on Monday, Steve Murawski, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's chief scientist for fisheries, told CNN such a concern is, in some cases, unfounded.

"Oil does not necessarily bio-magnify into larger things," Murawski said. Fish, dolphins and other larger sea animals process and excrete oil. However, he said, consumers "need to be more careful with oysters and shrimp."

At the height of the spill, skimming vessels were collecting 25,000 barrels of oil a day.

But authorities are not quite ready to dismiss the 811 skimmers who have been used to collect surface oil. Allen says that won't happen at least until after the well has been sealed.

"We're not out of the woods yet. We still need a permanent kill," Allen said.

Boom used to try to stop oil from reaching shore is another matter. Zukunft said 11 million feet of boom have been arrayed throughout the Gulf.

He said that in coming days, authorities will consider removing some of the boom, in some cases by the fishing vessels that were employed to help lay it out. Zukunft said there are concerns that if storms develop this summer, the boom could be pushed into fragile marshland, damaging it.

But collecting the boom could take time. Zukunft said that if 60 miles of boom are recovered each day, the process could take through Labor Day. The recovered boom has to be decontaminated before it can be used again.

Then there's the question of oil that may be lurking under the surface. Allen noted it took weeks after the Deepwater Horizon explosion for oil to reach shore, and oil in the form of tar balls could continue to wash up on beaches for some time.

"When you put somewhere between 3 million and 5.2 million barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico, I don't think anybody can understate the impact and the gravity of that situation," he said.
 
or mother nature did her part & it's gone.

I was reading a story yesterday.. i'll find it.. talking about how it's already been dissolved in the ocean & that was the last we'll hear of it. I won't even pretend to understand the science behind it.
 
or mother nature did her part & it's gone.

I was reading a story yesterday.. i'll find it.. talking about how it's already been dissolved in the ocean & that was the last we'll hear of it. I won't even pretend to understand the science behind it.

nope, it's still in the ocean.
 
nope, it's still in the ocean.

so scientists are baffled, but you're positive its still there?

I have no idea where it is, I'm just saying it was an interesting possibility.
 
found the story. again, I have no idea who is right. just a story i read.

Impact of Gulf spill 'quite small': expert

NEW ORLEANS, Louisiana — Louisiana's fragile marshes should recover from the Gulf of Mexico oil spill in a matter of months and the environmental impact will be "quite small," a leading expert said.
The upbeat assessment of the damage from the Deepwater Horizon oil disaster came from geologist Ed Owens, a world authority on protecting shorelines from oil spills contracted by BP to lend his expertise to the response effort.
Owens, who was the technical advisor to Exxon's clean-up teams on the Exxon-Valdez oil spill in Alaska from 1989 to 1993 and has been involved with oil spill response and research since 1970, has worked in Louisiana's wetlands before.
"It's a very, tiny, tiny fraction of what's spilled has actually reached any of the shorelines in the area, which means that the environmental impact in terms of the coastal side of it is quite small," Owens told AFP.
"Because of the nature of the oil, we expect that the recovery will be very much in a matter of months to a year at the most. We're not talking about years or decades here as has been the case for other spills in the United States."
The assessment from Owens flies in the face of research from other leading scientists who have warned of a decades-long effect on marine life that could lead to a shift in the overall biological network in the Gulf of Mexico.
Doug Inkley, a senior scientist at the National Wildlife Federation, warned recently that the more than 2,600 dead birds, mammals and turtles found by BP and the US government could be just the tip of the iceberg.
"You could have a (population) crash later because of the failure of many of the young to survive this year," said Inkley. "The impacts on wildlife I expect will last for years, if not decades."
But Owens said most of the oil had dispersed naturally in the weeks it took to reach shore and that skimming, burning and the use of dispersants had all contributed as had the strong outflow at the Mississippi River Delta.
"If we measure it in terms of area we are talking way less than 100 hectares (247 acres), and so the scale of the problem is not as vast as one might think given the amount of oil that has been spilled," he said.
That area represents some 100 kilometers (62 miles) of Louisiana's 7,000 kilometers of wetland coastlines, a favorite breeding ground for hundreds of species of rare birds and marine animals and an important natural buffer zone for hurricane-prone New Orleans.
The marshes have to be cleaned painstakingly from the water by boat as walking through them or driving on them in vehicles does more damage than the actual crude.
He said he did not expect the sequence of events in this spill to be any different from the past: the oil on the stems of the marsh vegetation will fall with the stems as they start dying in September and become biological litter.
"That litter is attacked by microbes and bacteria through the winter months and they break it down and it forms sort of the nutrient base if you like for the regrowth in the spring," he told AFP.
"And so it biodegrades with the stems as they also biodegrade and in the spring the expectation from this event... is that there will be regrowth without the presence of oil."
Owens said the challenge for his clean-up teams will be any larger lumps of tar that get deposited on parts of the marsh that will not break down as readily and as quickly as oil that's on the stems.
"Right now we're not touching them, but it will be part of our plan once we move into this phase when there's no further threat of oil from offshore.
"When we decide at that point what further clean-up we will be recommending, areas that have tar that may smother the plants and prevent regrowth will be addressed in terms of cleaning recommendations," he said.
 
I expect to see the consequences of this spill for years to come. Something doesn't just disappear. If it was consumed by organisms, there will be deposits from them. Whether its clearly visible to the human eye, or seen in the future/under microscopes, something of this proportion doesn't just disappear.
 
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they have estimates of how much oil leaked over the 3 months and they have estimates of how much was burned, skimmed, evaporated, eaten by microbes, etc. and no one knows where the remaining 40% of the oil went, possibly on the seafloor. Either way it's a big concern because the oil can continue to cause environmental issues for years to come.


ok. I thought for a minute that was some kind of joke.

It never crossed my mind that it would be a problem finding the oil.
 
so scientists are baffled, but you're positive its still there?

if you read the articles I posted above they're not baffled, they know the oil is still in the ocean, they just don't know exactly where and when/where it will surface in the future.
 

Federal scientists are still trying to determine how much oil may be lingering underwater. The underwater oil is floating through the water column, not embedded on the seafloor, said Jane Lubchenco, head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

this is silly. like I've said numerous times, I have no idea what happened to it, and either do they. I referenced a story where it said they were baffled. you're quoting people's ideas about what happened to it, as if to suggest they know. At this point there are theories, but nobody knows where it's at or exactly what happened.

I read a story that I found interesting, that was all.
 
this is silly. like I've said numerous times, I have no idea what happened to it, and either do they. I referenced a story where it said they were baffled. you're quoting people's ideas about what happened to it, as if to suggest they know. At this point there are theories, but nobody knows where it's at or exactly what happened.

I read a story that I found interesting, that was all.

really, they don't know because this is the first oil spill in history???
 
really, they don't know because this is the first oil spill in history???

The climate in the gulf may play a role, as the story I posted above said.

"Because of the nature of the oil, we expect that the recovery will be very much in a matter of months to a year at the most. We're not talking about years or decades here as has been the case for other spills in the United States."

I'm not a fucking scientist, I have no idea what I'm talking about. I apologize ruining the doom & gloom thread with a possible (however unlikely) glimmer of hope.
 
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really, they don't know because this is the first oil spill in history???

No, they don't know because they are working for our government which basically means they are incompetent.
 
What happens when you inject oil into cold water at high pressure? It's becomes a thick goopy mess, like margarine or hydrogenated vegetable fat.....most of it is sitting like lumpy gravy at the bottom of the gulf,
 
I went there a few week ago and the place in LA eatery's are mostly dead sea food is alittle high in some places :thinking:
 
A lot of people have seen the oil - with news cameras.

And, most of the oil leaked cannot be seen - but it IS, there.

This is just another bullsh*t media story.

Pretty pathetic. Think: oil $$$$.
 
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/04/science/earth/04oil.html?_r=1

"The government is expected to announce on Wednesday that three-quarters of the oil from the Deepwater Horizon leak has already evaporated, dispersed, been captured or otherwise eliminated — and that much of the rest is so diluted that it does not seem to pose much additional risk of harm...."
 
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